…girls with expensive cameras pose. It is not the last song on the album (well it is if you play the B side before the A side), and there were a few singles and compilation songs released afterwards, but this how i see Shrag left us: A perfect, driving song of such correctness and determination, promising and setting everything right with the world, with music, with me, with you. Everything the band was in one song. Through they’re ten years as a band Shrag just got better and better, and to leave on this, with everything that could have been as potent and incredible as everything that was, i can’t think of a better farewell.

I tell you it’s been kinda liberating. I could have easily followed this slippery slope and completely given up on this thing, but, i don’t know, there’s this compulsion i have to it. And it’s really only for me. But now we’re settled, we have internet, school is on a mid-semester break, so i’ll continue.

Is it really such a bad thing when bands end? Shrag have been one of my favourite bands in the world these past few years and have recently announced they will soon break up. I should be sad, and i sort of am, but really all i feel it comes is to one less band i have to keep up on. I never gave hope to the chance to see them and to be any more to me than three incredible albums and a bunch of singles. They could have meant more to me if everything wasn’t so distant to me. Most if not all of my favourite bands are broken up relics and i’m all too comfortable to have Shrag slot right along side of them. I still have their incredible music and always will. I don’t mind what there is of it no longer growing at a rate i can’t keep up with again.

The apprehension with which i hold the future of the Pains of Being Pure at Heart can be shared with Shrag. Except it is not so much a feeling of dread in this case. Quite the converse. I have near-complete confidence that everything they ever do will be just as fantastic as everything they have ever done. So why the apprehension? They are just the two bands in the world i love, am abreast of, excite me, and want very much to keep on my side (yes, the only two…). It is that want, and (no matter how assured i am) the unshakable pessimism with which i hold everything that feeds my apprehension. Imagine living like this…

In Shrag’s case, everything will be fine. If Grass Widow did not exist, this would have been the best thing released last year.